To Brenda, for patience,
and Adrian and Dorian, for purpose
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a true story. The names of many of the persons mentioned, as well as some details and events surrounding them, have been modified in order to protect their privacy.
I published an excerpt of these events in which I stated that my brother Tim did not attend a birthday party, and subsequently I discovered a photograph of that party in which, staring into the camera, is Tim. I have made the change here. On other occasions when I discovered my memory to be in conflict with fact, I sided with the latter.
The Past—the dark unfathom’d retrospect!
The teeming gulf—the sleepers and the shadows!
The past—the infinite greatness of the past!
For what is the present after all but a growth out of the past?
(As a projectile form’d, impell’d, passing a certain line, still keeps on,
So the present, utterly form’d, impell’d by the past.)
—Walt Whitman, “Passage to India”
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
Prologue: Gods
A Place Like This
Schooled
Seduced
The Lake of Fire
Strange Fruit
Disobedience
Orientation
Real
Chameleons
Sissies
Sacraments of Reconciliation
Baddest Nigger in Town
Bobby Jenkins
The Souls of White Folk
Workshopped
Bad Outcomes
We Are Americans
Floated
Simplicity
The Second Act
Scattered Inconveniences
My Sister’s Roommate
Communion
Trash
Technicalities
Break-In
The Interview
Break-Out
Bait
Great Expectations
Captain Walker
Poop
A Place of Redemption
Gang Life
Visible Man
Naked
Game
The Professor
Dragon Slayers
Bullets
The Mechanics of Being
When Love Speaks
Two Boys
Principles of Math
Outlaws
Epilogue: Clowns
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE: GODS
When my twin brother and I were born in 1964 there were eight years left to live. Our apartment was already stockpiled with food, though it is still unclear to me for what purpose, since, according to the church to which we belonged, all followers of our faith would become gods at the sound of Gabriel’s horn. That would also be the moment my parents would regain their eyesight, allowing them to see their six children for the first time. This alone, it seemed to me, would have been reason enough to die.
In 1968, four years before we were to receive our salvation, Martin Luther King Jr. received his. We lived on Chicago’s West Side then; I remember sitting with my family in the living room after word spread of his assassination, watching our neighborhood burn on the evening news. The volume was on mute while my older sister Mary described the madness to our parents. When she spoke of the police’s use of water hoses and how they fired guns into the rioting crowds, my father shook his head and said that Jesus couldn’t return too soon.
And then in 1970, with the world’s end so near and the prime rate so low, my parents decided that if they were ever going to own a home, they’d better do it now. They put an offer on a four-bedroom bungalow on the South Side, right in the heart of a middle-class white community, without fear of protest or assault, as if we were gods already.
My parents’ decision to move among white people did not sit well with some of our relatives, especially Aunt Bernice. She cleaned whites’ homes for a living and spoke frequently of their lack of hygiene, the fact that they didn’t use soap, for instance, and that they soiled their sheets and ate food right off the floor. This was to be expected, Aunt Bernice insisted, from a people who had enslaved our ancestors and still enslaved us now; just look at the awful schools in our communities, and the drugs and crime, look at how they kill off our leaders like they killed off King. “And you want to go live with these folks?” she asked, shaking her head. “Don’t be surprised if you wake some morning to a cross burning in your front yard.”
But because the Prophet said there soon would be crosses burning in everyone’s front yard, my parents did not add this to their list of concerns, not until January 1, 1972, had come and gone and the world was still here, they were still blind, we were still mortals, and there was a basement full of baked beans and creamed corn. And on top of that, there was a mortgage to be paid that they could barely afford. The last thing they needed was a cross-burning. Every once in a while they had us look outside to make sure none was there, and one morning, instead of a burning cross, we found a seven-year-old white boy named Ryan. He wanted to know if my twin brother Jimmy and I could come out to play.
We weren’t supposed to socialize with people not of our faith, so Jimmy and I were surprised when my father said we could go. We followed Ryan across the street and into his backyard where later that summer Jimmy broke both of his arms, though the cause was not racial violence, as Aunt Bernice first suspected, or God’s wrath, as my parents first suspected, but calcium deficiency. Ryan introduced us to several other white kids in the neighborhood, and within a short period of time I had tangible evidence that some of the things Aunt Bernice said about whites weren’t true. I had seen soap in their houses. I had seen them eat from bowls and plates. And I had been enslaved only once, for a mere ten minutes, due to Ryan’s gimpy bathroom door.
A few years later he was gone. The other kids were as well, their parents’ experiment with integration at its end. Perhaps if they had remained, the roots of my aunt’s racist narrative would not have taken hold in my subconscious, a narrative that would find ample nourishment from the blacks who moved into the community and hated white people as much as she did. Soon it would be hard to remember that Ryan and the other kids had been nice to us, and that they had not pushed Jimmy off the swings and broken his arms, as he sometimes said. The only opposing narrative, as I recall, was from Tommy, my oldest brother, who, at thirteen, was already laying roots of his own to support his future conservative views. Tommy never spoke against whites. He never complained of racism. He talked only of self-reliance and self-help. So we hated him too.
But the majority of my negative energy in those days was reserved for our church. I hated how different it made me feel from other kids. I hated, for example, that we worshipped on Saturday instead of Sunday. We couldn’t celebrate Christmas or birthdays. We couldn’t dress up for Halloween or go trick-or-treating. Easter was also off limits. Most of all I hated how joyfully our members spoke of the coming Armageddon, as if it were no more than the circus. They could have their eternal life and communion with God. I wanted clowns.
A PLACE LIKE THIS
The winos were already there, four middle-aged men wrapped in the coats of giants. I took my place among them. I removed my cigarettes from my pants pocket and distributed them to the fingers trembling toward me. We smoked in silence while responsible people hurried past, heading toward the elevated train station or to the stores that lined this strip of 35th Street. It was my day off from responsibility, I had decided; I’d called in sick to my unit clerk job at the medical center. I wasn’t sure I’d return. I wasn’t sure of much of anything, only that I was out of coke and it was important to be drunk until I got some more.
; The winos’ radar clicked in and they moved toward the door seconds before it opened. The proprietor stepped back as we entered, saying good morning to some of us by name. He went behind the counter where three other men stood praising Michael Jordan’s antics they’d seen on TV. All of the winos headed in that direction. They wanted Wild Irish Rose and Mad Dog, kept on the glass shelves above the register, but I had scrounged enough money for something better. Minutes later I emerged from the store with a pint of cognac and a forty-ounce of Olde English 800. A boy who couldn’t have been more than fourteen joined me. He asked me to help him buy some liquor. I told him no. I told him he should be in school. He laughed and said I should be in school.
Years later I would think back to that incident and wonder if the boy even existed, if he were merely my subconscious urging me toward the path of salvation. But I couldn’t comprehend that then, had no way to recognize any latent desire to be saved. All I knew was that at twenty-one my life was a mess and couldn’t get any worse. But things can always get worse.
Sometime later that day I woke on my couch to a ringing phone. It was my friend Greg bearing good news: He’d started working at a dope house near 47th and King Drive and asked if I wanted credit. I told him I’d be there as soon as I found a ride. I called my ex-girlfriend Pam. “Fool,” she hissed, “do you know what the hell time it is?” I didn’t but she told me; it was close to midnight. I promised to get her high. Give her thirty minutes, she responded, maybe a bit longer because of the storm. I moved close to my window and saw that it was snowing, a full-scale blizzard, in fact, weightless flakes swirling in all directions.
While I waited I straightened up a bit, stuffing empty liquor bottles and canned goods into a large garbage bag. For the first time in two days I showered and brushed my teeth. I still had a little of the cognac left but I was out of beer and decided we’d stop and get some more.
The dope house was only a few miles away. Ten minutes after picking me up, Pam double-parked on a side street and let me out. Six inches of powder had blanketed the abandoned lot I trudged through, transforming the debris into something beautiful. When I reached the alley, I made a left and headed for the back stairs of a three-story brownstone. I was on the first landing when from behind me a man’s voice ordered me to stop. Seconds later a hand rummaged through my coat pockets while another struggled to steady a gun. It vibrated against my temple.
“Where’s the money?” the man demanded.
“I …I … don’t have any.”
“Don’t bullshit me!”
I told the robber I wasn’t bullshitting him, that I was only there to see a friend. He pulled four envelopes from my back pocket, the mail I had grabbed before leaving my apartment lobby. He stuffed them inside his coat and backed away. I turned to leave.
“No, no.” He motioned the gun up the stairs. “Go where you were going.”
I went to the third floor. At apartment six I slipped a hand through the burglar bars to knock on the door. It opened before I touched it, just wide enough for me to see a sliver of Greg’s dark brown face and his signature tan beret.
“I was just robbed,” I said.
“What?”
“Right downstairs!”
We both laughed and shook our heads. “You’re the second one today,” he responded, handing me a gram of coke between the rusted wrought iron. For my “inconvenience” he gave me another one at half price. I promised I’d pay him in two days.
Back at the car, I told Pam about the gunman.
“He didn’t get the coke, did he?” she asked.
“No,” I told her, “he robbed me as I was going up the stairs. He was gone when I came down.”
“You a lucky motherfucker,” she said. “‘Cause I’d have killed you for having me come out here for nothing.”
She knew what mattered.
“Let’s get some beer,” I suggested.
Thirty minutes later we were back at my apartment, and sometimes I imagine that as the first line of coke entered my body, the first bullet entered Greg’s. I see our heads tilting back simultaneously, mine coming to rest on my vinyl couch, Greg’s on the snow-covered tenement stairs. I reach for Pam to rub her thigh as the gunman reaches for Greg to search his pockets. Pam rises and moves toward the bathroom, pausing to wink at me, and the gunman rises to run into the shadows, pausing to shoot Greg five more times. Greg is found with a .32 still in his hand, unused, and Pam finds me with a can of beer in mine, unopened. Greg is dead. Pam is naked. I believe myself to be a lucky man.
I know I am a minute later when I hear the news.
My older brother Tim called to deliver it. He’d arrived on the scene shortly after me in search of free dope too, but instead found a crowd of nighthawks contemplating a corpse, everyone hoping, no doubt, that it wasn’t someone they knew. At first no one could tell; part of his face was missing. But a tan beret was there.
“Maybe …,” I stammered, “maybe somebody else had the same beret …”
“Naw, it was his. He’s dead.”
I denied it. Tim insisted and I denied it some more until I did so in quivers, then whispers, and when I fell silent he said he had to go.
I set the phone back on the receiver. Pam tried to comfort me, her hand light on my shoulder. I pushed it away. I told her to get her things and leave. I was slumped on the couch, naked but for my briefs and socks, my bowed head between my hands, half seeing Pam throw on her clothes, half hearing her curse me.
Before she was out the door I’d started crying, wailing like a baby, and even then I knew the life I grieved was my own. Where was the elementary school bookworm? Where was the high school honor student? What had happened to my love of reading? I was a drug addict, high at that very moment on the coke of a dead friend.
I cried until I couldn’t cry anymore and then I rose with the plate of coke and paced the room. I stopped at the window. Outside the snow fell steadily, making its haphazard descent to the street sixteen floors below, and I imagined how it would scatter in my wake as I tumbled through it. This vision replayed in my head as I snorted another line. Then I opened the window. Rather than cold air rushing in, I could feel the warm air rushing out, coaxing me, showing me the way. Several minutes passed before I extended the plate over the sill.
Twenty-five years later, tossing the drug to the wind is still the second most difficult thing I’ve ever done. The most difficult thing is still that I didn’t follow it.
But in a way I did. I withdrew from everyone, so thoroughly isolating myself that the body at Greg’s funeral might as well have been my own. I refused all social invitations. I accepted no visitors. I wouldn’t even speak to Tim.
I left my apartment only to go to work and to the grocery store. For six months my sole companions were telemarketers, smooth-talking men who stayed up with me all night giving counsel, telling me how to get my life together. I was assured from the deck of a yacht that I could make a million dollars selling real estate. I was told that I could regain vigor with the purchase of a juicer. Ginsu knives, I was promised, could make me happy.
Sometimes I received counseling from a porn star. She wore red lingerie as she lay on a bed next to a telephone and behind a stuffed bear that she gently stroked. If I was lonely, she said, I needed simply to pick up the phone and call. One night I did. “What’s your name?” she moaned. I started telling her, not realizing she was a recording until she interrupted me, not understanding that I was paying good money only to listen. But I wanted to talk, too. I hung up and called someone else.
“I’m an alcoholic,” I said.
The woman who’d answered the hotline already knew. “Yes, yes,” she replied. “Of course you are.” Her voice was soothing and kind; I got the sense she cared about me. She asked me what prompted me to call.
“Your commercial,” I told her.
Now she wanted to know my drinking habits, examples of how liquor was affecting my life. I told her it made me do things I’d probably never do while so
ber, such as make this call.
“Have you been drinking?”
“Yes.” And then I added, “But only beer.” It was all I allowed myself, less and less as the weeks went by.
“People often call while drinking,” she told me. She wanted me to come to a meeting. I said I would. She took my zip code and gave me the address of a substance abuse center not far from where I lived. “So, you’ll be there Saturday at nine, Mr. Jenkins?”
Bobby Jenkins was the name I’d given her. “Sure,” I said, “I’ll be there Saturday.”
But I did not go.
I did not go to the AIDS meeting either.
“Don’t die alone,” that counselor had pleaded with me, a passionate man who seemed close to sobbing. “We can help you. You must want help,” he reasoned, “or you wouldn’t have called.”
“True,” I said.
“How long have you been infected?”
“I’m not sure that I am.”
“Have … have you been tested?”
“No.”
“Have you had unprotected sex with an infected partner?”
“No.”
“Are you an intravenous drug user?”
“No,” I said.
He hung up.
I bought a Bible. I read from it every morning from four to five o’clock with a televangelist who spoke calmly and reasonably from behind a desk. I ordered the book he’d written, which contained the ten keys to life and the afterlife, five keys on each side. During the month or so he counseled me, the childhood memories of going to church every week with my family made me unbearably nostalgic. After one of my sessions with the reverend, I called home. My mother answered; it was the first time I’d heard her voice in two years. She didn’t seem to mind that it wasn’t yet dawn. “I think I’d like to go to church with you and Daddy this Saturday,” I said. But they had stopped going. I was shocked by this news, because they’d always had been strict believers, or maybe, it occurred to me, they’d only been strict church attendees. It was just as well, though, because I didn’t really want to go back to church. I wanted to go back in time.
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